Editor's Note: Pony R. Horton is a life-long Star Trek fan and visual effects artist, and has joined the Star Trek: Phase 2 post-production team working on "Blood and Fire." He took a few minutes away from his work to tell us about one of the effects he is completing on the soon to be released episode.

Being Transported into the World of Star Trek
by Pony R. Horton

I have been a fan of Star Trek ever since the show premiered in 1966, when I was 8 years old. However, I didn’t become a real Trekkie (or Trekker) until about 1973, when the reruns were in full swing and the animated series had just come on the air.

By 1977, I was also a STAR WARS fan, and wanted to work in the visual effects end of the film industry, as well as maybe become a director. Since I lived in Burbank and Glendale, California, this was not as difficult as it would be if I had come from somewhere else in the country. I was basically raised around the TV and film industries, so I felt right at home.

In 1978, I was lucky enough to land a job at Van der Veer Photo Effects, one of the small group of great optical houses that worked for many years creating high-end visual effects for films and TV, among them, the Original STAR TREK series. Granted, I was at the bottom of the totem pole, as a gofer/janitor (I was a REALLY lousy janitor), but I was allowed to hang out in any area I wanted, and was quickly put to work in my off hours doing rotoscoping work on 1941 and NIGHTWING; helping move miniatures around the blue screen stage, processing hi-con mattes, and other little jobs that are expected of an apprentice. My favorite area was the Matte Painting room, where I would gaze, enthralled, at the artwork of Lou Litchenfield, Mike Lloyd, and others, and I quickly decided that Matte Paintings were what I wanted to do, among other things.

One of the old-timers at Van der Veer was an optical printer operator named Hugh Wade. I remember he always smoked a pipe, even while using the printer. Well, Hugh was one of the people who worked on creating the original transporter beaming effects, and he was kind enough to impart to me the secret of how they were created. For years I had been of the impression (thanks to Stephen Whitfield’s book, THE WORLD OF STAR TREK) that the “sparkles” we have become so familiar with were done using glitter, either sprinkled downward against a black background and printed in reverse, or as glitter filmed in water which was being stirred. Even LeVar Burton himself mentioned this as the technique used, during his speech at the Star Trek 30th Anniversary Special.

I’m here to tell ya, none of it is true!

If you sprinkle glitter, it sparkles alright, but it falls very quickly and at a rather uniform rate without the clumping, billowing, and varying speeds we see in a classic transporter shot. If you put it in water and stir it, it looks just like that – sort of a cheesy Lava Lamp effect, and NOT at all like a transporter as designed by Starfleet.

I’m now going to tell you the secret, but you MUST NOT reveal it to ANYONE, or I’ll have to kill you.

Two words: ALKA SELTZER!

Yep, the sparkles from the TOS transporters were simply Alka Seltzer in a small fish tank filled with HOT water, and lit from beneath, shot against black at high speed.

This technique was borrowed from the many commercial productions that are often the bread-and-butter work for an optical house. Hot water makes the tablets fizz better, so they used that method, and suddenly – ENERGIZE – and Transport Complete!

Well, actually not complete yet. They still had to dissolve the actors off of, or onto, an empty set such as the Transporter Chamber, and then take THAT pre-dissolved footage into the optical printer again, and superimpose the sparkles over the actors’ bodies as they dissolve away, using rotoscoping to isolate the basic shapes of the actors as a matte for the sparkles. The actors would “freeze” into the “beaming” pose for a few seconds, and then exit the shot, which would continue rolling on the same area, now empty. Camera moves and actor movements were pretty-much forbidden, as the cost of roto-ing the actors over a 5-second shot, frame-by-frame, would amount to 120 frames of hand-drawn artwork, which was cost prohibitive. Camera moves were out of the question, as motion control was not in use at that time, not for another 10 years or so. The roto shapes, during the best beaming shots, always started full-body with a soft, feathered edge; the sparkles would encompass and cover the actor; the actor would dissolve into nothing followed quickly by the main sparkles; and finally a small central “heart” area was all that was left sparkling for a second or two before itself fading out.

Flash-forward to 2008, and STAR TREK: PHASE II puts out an open call for volunteers to work on its latest shows. I jumped into the ring, sent them a small demo clip of myself being beamed out from Vasquez’ Rocks – A.K.A. Cestus III and Vulcan, along with telling them the secret of the effects from TOS. Well, I was thrilled and honored when they picked me to create transporter effects, as well as some matte shots of a dangerous stellar stream within a binary star system, and I quickly got to work.

These days, we do almost everything on computers. In my case, that was simply a matter of expedience: I don’t have a camera capable of shooting at the high speeds needed to get an Alka Seltzer shot, so I decided to use the particle systems built into Lightwave, a popular (though somewhat frustrating and clunky) 3D program. Initially, I tried to use flat artwork in After Effects, animating it by hand in an upward stream, but no matter what I did, it looked like just that – flat art moving upward over the actors. So, in particle systems, I created several particle emitters of varying sizes, tweaked the flow and growth rates, and in order to truly simulate the random clumpiness of Alka Seltzer bubbles (which have a tendency to bunch-up as large chunks of the tablets break off and float upward, emitting their own bubbles in the process) I moves some of the smaller emitters in an upward direction, twirling them as they went by. This created a billowy, random-ish wash of bubbles which I made sure were slightly softened and colored a light gold, rendered against black or an Alpha channel.

I then took these sparkle elements into After Effects (which is like a combination Multi-Plane animation stand, Oxberry animation stand, Acme bi-pack matte camera and rotoscope rig, and optical printer all rolled into one) and supered them in several staggered, speed-varied layers over the actors, which I had rotoscoped and dissolved off the stage just like Hugh Wade did in the 1960’s. The staggering and speed varying were crucial to getting a more random, hydro-dynamic motion to the sparkles. I also staggered the actors sparkles per each person, so they would not all be billowing in the same place at the same time like clones in the printing. Finally, there were two little tweaks I brought to the table that I like to think gave the transporter effect a slightly more 3-dimensional quality than the original, and help place the effect “in the room” with the characters and settings rather than just supering them over.

   The first tweak I did was to dissolve-in the beams of the actors in the background a hint sooner than the foreground people, creating the effect of allowing you to ACTUALLY SEE THROUGH the person in front to the person behind them as the front person begins to lose cohesion during full-sparkle.

   The second thing I did was rotoscope various “interactive” glows and cast-light effects in the scene itself, with the idea that during full transport, the beams and sparkles ACTUALLY CAST LIGHT out into the room, and would therefore be seen as a bit of a glow and shine on the walls and other surroundings. One of the shots even had a hint of smoke in the foreground, and I created a similar, glowing pass of smoke to be supered over the existing smoke in the scene.

   To me, it’s little subtleties like that which create a more believable effect. I will say that my beams are not a perfect reproduction of the originals, but are so close that anyone looking at them will hopefully say “Wow, that looks just like it did on the show, only somehow… cooler!

I want to thank Joel Bellucci and James Cawley for giving me the opportunity to work on a show that has, since its original inception, been a major factor in my life.

STAR TREK: PHASE II is every bit a full-fledged Star Trek show, with all of the love, fun, talent, and spirit of the original, and it’s been an honor to finally become “a member of the crew, NCC-1701.”

Editor's Note: See more of Pony’s visual effects work in the upcoming Star Trek: Phase II’s “Blood and Fire.” As you can see by the photographs, Pony also appears as our favorite archiologost adventurer Indiana Jones. He is seen here in a recent appearance at Legoland, where he was making a personal appearance in connection with a film called "Indyfans and the Quest for Fortune and Glory." He has appeared in USA Today and the Antelope Valley Press as Indy, and the photo of him preparing to pop the whip at the playing card comes from that USA Today article. The photo was provided courtesy of Pony, but taken by Dan MacMedan.

08-04-2008

Pony showing his mad skillz with a whip.

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